The Glory, Glory
by TheLionTree
Summary: Written for FKM. Joshua Graham meets Caesar as he passes from this world into the next, and the two make peace.  Christian overtones, as Graham is a Mormon.  One Shot.


_I've been NANOWriMOing it a little to much to write much fanfiction. Lets hope that crazy story gets me somewhere. Anyways here is something I did for the KinkMeme where someone requested Graham and Caesar meet up and make peace in the end. Named after a Legendary Pink Dots Song. Review if you like it, review if you don't, review if you want pizza rolls._

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><p>Amber was the light coloring the morning. The light stretched out across plant, water, human, and even moved into the cracks in the dark places. As it traveled it allowed itself to grace the face of Joshua Graham. With prayer on his lips the old man pressed his hands together on his chest, stirring one last raspy and sick cough from his failing lungs. The fire had made his heart weak; that he'd grown so old was a miracle. Even more amazing was the loving woman who leaned over him now, twenty years his junior, with his teenage son standing behind her, to young and proud to cry.<p>

Gwen pressed her lips to his head, causing the golden light of morning to slide in thin lines across his face and onto the wall next to him. It showed her kissing him in a dark impression. Nothing about Gwen was ever dark, she was a breath of fresh air, a reward for the penance he performed everyday when he undressed and redressed the bindings covering his ruined skin. He knew the way she waited here that she loved him. She loved him. He loved her. And God loved both of them more.

If only God could forgive him for the things he had done.

The world shifted in that yellow light of morning. Everything in Graham's vision turned bright and blurry, like you were looking at a lamp through a crystal. He could smell Gwen now, and she smelled like everything that was sweet and glorious about women. Then he smelled his mother making bread one spring morning in Salt Lake City. Orange, brown, a grayish green, shifted to be predominate colors of the prism, and he heard his son finally giving in and crying. He was a good boy, more that Joshua Graham ever deserved. He was strong and bold like his father, but with a gentle goodness that only his mother could have given him. He was a better man than Joshua Graham, and it pleased the dying man, as he spun and churned in this crystalline mist.

"Welcome home," a soft voice, neither male or female said from his right shoulder, and he turned.

His body was whole again. Graham reached out and curled his fingers, the bandage free skin was pink and new like it was when he first met the Blackfoot. The tender aching in the center of his bones was gone from his hands and spine. He could see now, everything and yet nothing at the very same time. The entire cosmos, galaxies, stars, everything swirling and molding itself, and he felt himself coming apart, becoming part of it.

"You were always part of it," A fatherly voice said from just over his shoulder. He turned to see the man, but he was not there.

"It's not what you expected, I know," A man who sounded like the son of that father said, his voice both youthful and sad. "We couldn't ever tell you it would be like this. Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, they are all just words. Descriptors. They are never fitting. It's everything Joshua Graham. Everything all at once: all of the beauty, all of the pain, and who you were as a man shapes how you see it. How it folds and bends around you. You've been a wicked man, and repented with a faith that would shake even Job. Welcome home my wayward brother, my father's beloved son, but you aren't ready for all of this yet. You have one person with whom you never made peace in your life."

"Forgive me Lord," Graham said, tears in his eyes; the first genuine tears of a lifetime that should have humbled him and left him weeping until he wasted and died. All his sins, all his mistakes, lay bare in a churning ball of inescapable furry. He found himself saying a prayer that God would forgive him, God would see he was a just man in the end, and take this heavy burden from his shoulders. Then he felt a light tapping on the same shoulder he heard the voices coming from.

It was Edward Sallow, before he was Caesar. Edward Sallow, as Joshua Graham first knew him, his hair a mess of thick brown curls, wrinkles gone from his eyes. A rosy and soft boy, full of ideas and bravery, a boy who had no idea the levels of depravity his golden tongue could bring others to. Petulant, cruel, Edward, but yet at the same time the youth held the gaze of a man, wise in years. He sat in a chair, which appeared in the white room in which they both occupied.

"My old friend, seat yourself," Edward beckoned, his voice soft and jovial.

Something bumped against the back of Graham's legs and behind them their stood an unremarkable black chair, with spindly thin legs, a wide seat, and several long dowels meeting a curved arch across the top. Joshua sat in the chair, unsure why he was obeying or even listening to Caesar, but something about the situation making his will so that it would not defy even the cruelest of phantoms at this venture.

"I thought you had been dead for some time," Graham marveled. "The courier killed you herself. She told me, when she came and helped me with the Sorrows. She moved around me, with that scar carved deep into her forehead, that sign that she too knew death only to jump away from the reapers grip. God help me, it pleased me to know you'd died at the hands of a woman."

"I'm sorry," was Edwards only response.

"I'm sorry too," Joshua Graham said, wondering what else there could be between the two of them now, but this expression of sorrow at who they were.

"You were a better man than me," Caesar now confessed. "I saw it when you and I first met. You were righteous, moral, in control of your emotions, and you turned the heads of the cute tribal women. I hated you. I wanted to debase you, to drag you behind me as my tool, and point you at the things I wanted destroyed. I knew in the process of creating my new world, I'd ruin everything about you that was worth knowing, and then I threw you away like rubbish. I was a monster. I'm sorry."

"You killed my entire family," Joshua Graham said, feeling oddly blank about it. "You ruined innocent lives…and I helped you. Father forgive me, I helped you…Even after the Dam. Even after the canyon and all that fire. I lead you right to them, and you slaughtered them like lambs on the sacrificial alter."

"I killed so many people," Edward confessed.

Then as Caesar, "We killed so many people. Did you think any tribe was immune after so many others fell before me? Why would I spare your family when I never showed mercy to anyone?"

"You were like a strong father," Graham said, "Like the one I wished I had, even though you were younger than me. When you spoke it was impossible not to listen. When you called us to arms, your words, your manners, that pride you took in us…We all looked up to you. Your approval was sweeter than any honey, and I loved you in ways that I never loved another man. I have prayed to God that he purge this from me a thousand times, but some nights I would remember the bonfire after our first victory…The speech you gave, the way you laid the crown of desert flowers on my head and told me I had done you proud. You were so beautiful. You were what I was not."

"I was only ever a man," Edward confessed, the white reflection off of the room making him garish and hard to see. "As men, we were the best men we knew how to be, and thousands paid with their lives. That's why we came here, you and I, to say this one last time and to come to an understanding."

"When you were Caesar, there was no God but you," Graham said, his own features fading away now too. The light that surrounding them eating at the barrier of his body, but then he realized the barrier was never really there. Flesh, ego, presence, it doesn't matter, we are all just part of this universal, indescribable, thing.

"Ave. You're lucky now Joshua," Caesar said, "You can look at the light now. You fostered it in your heart, you asked forgiveness and made room for it inside yourself. I did not. So now I curse how bright it is here. How disconnected I am from my body. Forgive me Joshua, but you will have to walk alone. Do remember, we always were and always will be a part of each other."

"The young me will stay with Edward," Graham said, looking older now as he sat in his simple black chair. "He'll hold Edward's hand, pray for him, and they will both curse the brightness of the light together."

"And what of you, old man?" Edward asked a young man with SLCPD-SWAT, written across his black armor.

"He'll move on, and reap his reward for being a good servant," The young man of twenty said, his hair cropped short, and the wonder of the world in his eyes.

"Are you sure you want to stay here with me?" Caesar asked the young Graham, who nodded his head with the confidence of a warrior.

"You were always a better man than me Joshua," Caesar said, squeezing the young man's hand tightly. "We'll sit here awhile and see what we can't do to shade our eyes from this light."

"You'll never block it out," The older Joshua said, standing up from his chair and walking towards where the light glowed the brightest. "There is nothing else, you make peace with it, or you stand in agony of it. May God preserve you Edward. May he forgive you, Caesar."

"Thank you my friend," Caesar said one last time, his eyes never shifting from the Graham that was staying with him.

The old dictator turned then, letting go of the hand of Joshua Graham, and realized he was painfully alone.

"What do I do now?" Caesar and Edward both asked, afraid. No answer came. They already knew what had to be done.


End file.
